The drive to produce new dried high protein dried ingredients for the infant formula and healthy aging sectors can often result in unforeseen problems during production. A critical factor in high protein ingredients is uncontrolled protein aggregation which may manifest as unwanted biofouling, pipeline/filter blockage, precipitation/sedimentation and overall poor visual appearance on reconstitution. The complexity of composition combined with multiple process effects (mixing, heating, pressure, shear forces etc.) together with the dynamic nature of continuous production is highly challenging and will require new tools to capture data in real time and that is spatially resolved. This presentation will briefly review existing imaging tools and will then describe new approaches to characterizing hydration of milk powders including milk protein concentrates. “Traditional” imaging tools, such as optical, confocal and electron microscopy are very useful but new approaches such as x-ray microtomography, atomic force microscopy, Raman microscopy and particularly high speed video can further our understanding of how powders are formed during the spray drying pipeline as well as the characterization of wetting, moisture uptake and dispersion of single powder particles. A new confocal microscopy technique employing fluorescent tracer dyes will be described that characterizes hydration rates of individual powder particles. Results show that these techniques (new and old) can be used to characterize powder hydration at the micrometre scale and in real time. Data from these analyses can be used to reverse-engineer powders with desired re-hydration properties.